“Skins of these animals are most precious, especially among distant nations”: Fur, Ecology, and Empire in the Pelt Portraits of Michel Sittow

Abstract

This article proposes ‘fur studies’ as a new art-historically grounded framework for understanding the material, ecological, and imperial dimensions of fur in early modern culture. Focusing on two portraits attributed to Michel Sittow, the essay examines how pelts and their depictions functioned not merely as signs of luxury or status, but as agents shaping ecological knowledge, global trade, and human–animal entanglement. Situating Sittow’s paintings within Baltic and North European networks of fur extraction and exchange, the article reconstructs what it terms Renaissance ‘pelliferous epistemologies’: regimes of knowledge surrounding furbearers, pelts, and their geographies of origin. Through close visual analysis of species-specific fur rendering, the study argues that Sittow’s portraits engaged contemporary questions of truth, perception, artistic labour, and human experience, while inscribing their sitters within wider ecological (“more than human”) and imperial geographies. In doing so, the article reconsiders furbearers and their skins as a critical but understudied category in Renaissance art, material culture, and environmental history. A second part, to be published in a subsequent volume of the Baltic Journal of Art History, extends this enquiry to sacred imagery through an examination of St. Adrian of Nicomedia on the Tallinn Passion Altarpiece.